9 Facts About Slavery They Don’t Want You to Know
A widely circulated list of historical "facts" about slavery dwells on the participation of non-whites as owners and traders of slaves in America.
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The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.
Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.
A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a “free negro” who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor’s services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls “one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime.”
– Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.
True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa.
– American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.
True. Historian Tiya Miles provided this snapshot of the Native American ownership of black slaves at the turn of the 19th century for Slate magazine in January 2016:
Miles places the number of enslaved people held by Cherokees at around 600 at the start of the 19th century and around 1,500 at the time of westward removal in 1838-9. (Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, she said, held around 3,500 slaves, across the three nations, as the 19th century began.)
– In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves.
Approximately true, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr.: There were approximately 319,599 free blacks in the United States in 1830. Approximately 13.7 per cent of the total black population was free. A significant number of these free blacks were the owners of slaves. The census of 1830 lists 3,775 free Negroes who owned a total of 12,760 slaves.
– Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.
True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa.
– Slavery was common for thousands of years.
True, as noted above — though how “common” slavery has been and what the specific nature of that slavery was has varied according to time and place.
White people ended legal chattel slavery.
It’s rather self-serving to claim that “white people” ended legal chattel slavery in the United States (much less ended chattel slavery, period), given that the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. could not vote, could not run for political office, and, in every other way conceivable, were excluded from institutional power. Moreover, even as some white people were laboring to put an end to slavery, many others were fighting to preserve it.
Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities
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